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#Soy #formula – my view

Our boy is now seven weeks old. He is the child we never thought we would have, and as I am 43 at the end of the week, I really did think it was too late. It makes the decisions over what we feed him even more important to us.

My husband and I are both vegans and we shall be raising our son vegan. It has proved so much easier to explain our soy and rice based formula choice by pointing out the allergies in our family rather than talking about being vegan – somehow allergies prove more acceptable than our desire to ideas around the environment and animals.

But then that has been easier than finding something for B to eat. I had intended to breast feed him, but when my milk didn’t come in, we were faced with finding something else.

The first thing we fed him was SMA soya formula. It isn’t truly vegan as the D3 comes from lanolin, but vegetarian was as close as we could find.

Also we had heard that you shouldn’t feed a child soya before the age of one year. But needs must, we had to feed him something and it was better than cows milk.

The soy immediately stopped him up and he didn’t poop for three days, until I fed him lots of boiled water. Also we were still looking for a truly vegan formula. Eventually we found a rice based formula called Premiriz which is truly vegan.

It isn’t sold in the UK, but we could buy from France (thank goodness for google translate).
We bought it from https://www.greenweez.com and at nearly 27 euros a tin, it is really expensive. We reckon that including postage, it works out at £25 a tin, compared to the soy at £13. It means we are now feeding our boy both soy and rice formula.

The rice keeps his digestion on track and we feel that as well as being cheaper, feeding him soy as well will prepare his digestion for soy when he is weened.

We have found a solution which while not perfect, is the best fit we can find. The bottom line is, that soy formula alone is not a great solution for feeding a vegan baby, but it is, in my opinion, a valuable contribution to their diet.